Tuesday, October 27, 2015

Chris Cox on How Facebook Sees Itself - WSJ

From an interview with Facebook’s chief product officer

"MR. COX: The core of Facebook is about two fundamental ideas. The first is being a directory, which is where Facebook gets its name. The past 10 years have been about taking down barriers to let new groups of people come onto Facebook: Let’s make it work for people outside of college. Let’s make it work for people outside of the U.S. Let’s make it work for non-English speakers. Let’s make it work on mobile. And now the fundamental challenge is, how do you make it work on a 2G connection, on a Moto E, in Hindi?

The second piece is as a medium. Just how do you express your experience to somebody else? If you look at Messenger and WhatsApp, you have intimate, high-frequency communication with people you care about a lot. If you move up, you have groups and events, which are about communicating with hundreds or thousands of people at a time. And then if you move up to news feed and Instagram, you have an even higher scale of audience. And depending on where you look in the world, you have people using those things in very different ways."